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About Us

This site is for self-employed people and small business owners who do not believe that the cost of hiring a professional tax representative is worth the gains of a successful audit decision. In other words, if you are being audited for an amount less than what a tax representative will charge, but you still wish to effectively defend your claims, this site is for you.

The value of Audit Self Defense

Without the information provided on this site, in order to properly defend yourself against a CRA tax audit, you would typically be required to:

Read all the CRA interpretive documents (Interpretation Bulletins, GST Memoranda and CRA guides) relevant to your business situation and determine where they do or do not accurately reflect the tax legislation and where they add to it;

Be prepared to recognize when CRA misuses their own interpretive documents; and

Read through hundreds of court decisions from the Tax Court of Canada to find ones relevant to your case that you can use throughout the process and then in your discussions with Justice Canada and in Tax Court.

Although Audit Self Defense encourages you to become as knowledgeable as possible using the resources listed above, you are not alone in thinking that the process can be overwhelming and excessively time-consuming. That's why we have distilled and organized the information to directly meet your needs.

How to use this site

Understanding how the information is broken down on this site will help you when dealing with a CRA tax audit.

Within each expense category, we further organize our information by the mostcommon tactics CRA will use to disallow such claims. In other words, we list the most common reasons CRA will state that your various business expenses are not eligible as tax deductions. When you receive your audit letter from CRA, you will be able to look up the tactics they use here.

For each tactic CRA uses to disallow your claims, we provide an "at-a-glance" overview of how CRA will phrase their decision, including the various legislative and bureaucratic documents they will reference. Most likely, the decisions made by CRA regarding your case will be similar to the examples we provide in this section.

Following the "at-a-glance" section, we then tell you how it really is, by explaining the actual law, with references to the sections in Canada's Income Tax Act and CRA interpretive documents. Remember, CRA auditors are not necessarily experts in Canadian tax law. They are motivated to collect, and it is your job to verify that their justifications for disallowing your tax claims are sound. You may use the information we provide in this section to tailor your own responses to CRA when defending your claims.

Finally, we summarise the CRA's tactic and the defense you should use in the conclusion. Although the information provided up to this point will be sufficient for many users, some may benefit from more specific examples of how to respond to CRA in defense of each disallowed claim.

Bonus: For those who want more specific examples of the kind of responses they can use when communicating with CRA, we provide a bonus section, called "Your Defense in a Nutshell", which you may use and modify for personal use. These bonus sections are available to registered users.

While nobody can guarantee a successful outcome in all cases, Audit Self Defense provides with information that can save you money and tools to save you time. With Audit Self Defense, you can ensure that you are equipped with enough knowledge to effectively defend yourself.

For more information, find out how to Prepare Yourself for a current or future CRA tax audit.

Audit Self Defense is committed to making sure you never have to pay more to CRA than you are legally required to, and to making sure you have the tools you need to calmly and effectively deal with CRA if they come calling. Do we want you to win your case? Absolutely! However, Audit Self Defense cannot guarantee successful audit decisions. Nobody can guarantee that.